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SciDAVis. Art of approximation

Scidavis-logoIn every-day life compromise is a good way to go on; not only with people but in interaction with our world.
Think when you have to remember something, a good old friend you still don't meet since many years: how could you preserve the last record? but above all, how could you record every his/her single particular?
It's impossible; you have to retain just some important points, but not all.
In other words, some informations are lost: a truly necessary compromise. But remaining ones are enough to rebuild the original?

That's our article's target!

An interesting field of application runs around the numerical calculus, a frightening expression to indicate a mathematical approach to problems solutions based on numbers and their interpolation (a kind of unification) and not on classical functions.

And this is perfect when informations (any kind) must be represented onto a computer, which has by definition a limited amount of memory where to put data (information is data representation).
A quick example: mathematical constant π has infinite numbers after decimal point; a computer can storage only a limited quantity. So making a computer calculate a circumference we'll get an error (if we won't use π directly), which will be negligible for our goals.

Computer can gives us a precise result if we don't need a very deep precision. In other words, in this context a correct information has been rebuilt.

The implied issue is that a strict relationship exists between mathematics and computers: numeric calculus gives the models to be verified by computer's elaboration, in a direct translation theory-practice: so software is required!

Among all possible we present here SciDAVis (Scientific Data Analysis and Visualization), a cross-platform free-software tool able to plot graphics of particular functions built starting from numbers interpolated as same function requires.